Work programme 2009-2012
ESU Board Meeting 59 and Board Meeting Seminar
The 59th European Students Union (ESU) board meeting seminar was focused on Quality Assurance.
Purpose /envisaged outcome
The purpose is to increase cooperation in the area of quality assurance between ESU, national student unions and other relevant stakeholders. The idea behind the project is to discuss the possibilities of cooperation in the sense of fostering quality culture rather than focusing exclusively on the bureaucratic process of quality assurance as often perceived today.
Among the operational outcomes we expect, we believe that the project will have a positive impact in the following ways:
- Enhancing QA policy work on the basis of the content cooperation between interested stakeholders.
- By boosting the internal capacity of student unions to work together to enhance quality in practical terms on the topic of QA.
- By fostering increased cooperation in work on Quality Assurance between stakeholders from the Quality Assurance Arena of the European Higher Education Area
Preliminary programme
The program is pending finalization, but will include the following overall components, that will be tackled during panels and workshops.
Social dimension through Quality Assurance?
How can quality assurance be a tool to realize parts of the social dimension of HE (within a vision of a holistic life long learning system)?
How to take into account the whole learning experience and environment of the student and how to increase gender equality and accepted diversity in HE through QA?: Mapping aspects which could be enhanced through QA and are not tackled yet.
On which level should they be tackled?
- Prerequisite demands regarding social dimension of HE towards governments (issues which HEIs/QAAs can not solve)
- Institutional level: internal quality assurance procedures on all levels of the HEI (department, faculty, university)
- External quality assurance of HEIs
- External quality assurance of QAAs
How should the social dimension of higher education be standardized within the ESG?
Student participation in Quality Assurance
What is the status quo about student participation in QA and how to enhance it further?
- Internal QA
- External QA
- External QA of QAAs
Transparency and information provision
Transparency and its links with QA.
- How is the implementation of transparency instruments such as QF, Diploma supplement and transcript of records and external QA working?
- What information do students need to be provided
- How should the information needed be provided?
- Which information on which level?
- Which methods for information provision?
A global level to quality assurance?
- What effect did the UNESCO/OECD guidelines have? How does their implementation stand?
- How to reach a global level of quality in higher education? Will standards and guidelines also evolve in other continents?
- What is the effect of GATS on the quality of higher education when HE gets more and more imported and exported?